Inference of the Russian drug community from one of the largest social networks in the Russian Federation

TL;DR

This study uses text mining of a large Russian social network to identify and analyze the online drug community, revealing distinct sub-networks and user interests related to narcotics in Russia.

Contribution

First to identify the online drug community in Russia using social network data and context-sensitive text mining of blogs with drug-related terminology.

Findings

Identified three scale-free sub-networks: 'infectious', 'susceptible', 'immune'

Found drug users interested in rock, non-traditional medicine, UFOs, Buddhism, yoga, and the occult

Mapped online drug community characteristics in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The criminal nature of narcotics complicates the direct assessment of a drug community, while having a good understanding of the type of people drawn or currently using drugs is vital for finding effective intervening strategies. Especially for the Russian Federation this is of immediate concern given the dramatic increase it has seen in drug abuse since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Using unique data from the Russian social network 'LiveJournal' with over 39 million registered users worldwide, we were able for the first time to identify the on-line drug community by context sensitive text mining of the users' blogs using a dictionary of known drug-related official and 'slang' terminology. By comparing the interests of the users that most actively spread information on narcotics over the network with the interests of the individuals outside the on-line drug community, we found that the 'average' drug user in the Russian Federation is generally mostly interested in topics such as Russian rock, non-traditional medicine, UFOs, Buddhism, yoga and the occult. We identify three distinct scale-free sub-networks of users which can be uniquely classified as being either 'infectious', 'susceptible' or 'immune'.